the Ego, it is

the Ego, it is Ego-substance. During intuition the path of training becomes individualized, it becomes a matter of individual responsibility. Intuition only becomes possible when one makes one’s moral will available. And then, as it were, the path of training turns into a reverse direction. One seeks to con nect back to the earth what one experiences. One has to do it. When experiencing inspiration one enters the general spiritual world, the world of the night, one could say. In intuition the task is set to bring the experiences of the “night” back into the daylight. For Ita Wegman with what Rudolf Steiner describes as her “wonderful inspirational-intuitional capabilities” (“wunderbare inspirativ-intuitive Fähigkeiten”) it was necessary, when she had had such an intuition, to make it true for herself, to understand it, so that she might be responsible for it. It is an ongoing to-and-fro process. A case history An experience of my own may serve to illustrate the above-mentioned steps. A patient who had to contend with what is called post-concentrationcamp, syndrome. Twenty or twenty-five years after people have been in a concentration camp they can suddenly develop all kinds of psychological and physical complaints: particularly abdominal and heart complaints, followed by insomnia, anxiety, hypersensitivity, fits of temper. This patient also had that and life became almost unbearable for him and those around him. I had tried to make him incarnate, particularly in his metabolism, but without much noticeable result. At one particular moment I had to consider calling in assistance from a psychiatric hospital. He had not worked for three months. It was an existential situation. I then built up an image of the patient over a number of evenings and asked myself what the trouble really was, without directly giving a final answer to the question. With that I fell asleep. A few days later while on my rounds the idea came to me that this patient had to have Iscador ® . I did not understand this but took the idea seriously. In the course of the day the in sight began to mature. Iscador is the specific for carcinoma. In carcinoma the situation arises that the higher components of the individual, the Ego and the astral body, do not work fully incarnating. A carcinoma is a sense-organ in the wrong place. In a sense-organ the Ego and the astral body are almost completely free from the organ. What happens in a concentration camp? People continuously experience shocks, greater and smaller. They cannot deal with these shocks, for then the problem only becomes bigger. They cannot incar nate. Under a shock one excarnates. Ego, astral body and even the etheric body come free to some extent. In a concentration camp this becomes a permanent state, 38

something that remains. This can last for twenty or twenty-five years and then comes the reaction. Iscador helps one to incarnate again. Now it was beginning to become clear. The problem in this case had not yet become physical, not yet a carcinoma. It was situated on the border between the astral and the etheric body. Hence it was necessary to give the Iscador not in massive doses but in a higher strength, e.g., St. 7. And to follow the rhythm of the astral body: the weekly rhythm. On the next visit the patient was given Iscador P St. 7. A week after the first injection he said: “I feel a bit better.” After the second in jection: “I’m beginning to be happy again, I’ve laughed for the first time in ages.” And after the third week he reported: “Tomorrow I’m going back to work.” The injections were given six times and repeated after six months. This treatment proved effective also with other patients and when given by other colleagues. The first step was to look at the illness afresh with an open mind, with astonishment: taking the first step, diagnosis, in daytime consciousness. This tunes the mind, which empathizes, which possesses the objective power of compassion. The power of feeling gives the astral body wings to enter the kingdom of night with a specific direction and there to behold the remedy. Of course one finds only those remedies with which one has built up a relationship. The third step: bringing the treatment back from the night into the daylight. “Seizing hold” of the insight, this takes place only when the situation has become existential. When the unreal personal things, the wishes, vanities and fads, have been burnt away by the fire of reality. When you have become unselfish. Only then can you observe (with your will) what the situation requires, and then the conscience can speak. If one tries to put into practice anthroposophical medicine in this way, training oneself, putting one’s own inner instrument into the service of heal ing, one thereby opens the gateway from which the healing forces flow: the gateway of the Ego. THE GATEWAY OF THE ETHERIC BODY The second gateway for healing is the etheric body. I shall give briefly a few points of view for it. The Hermetic or Mercury-mysteries When in the southern mysteries a person was conducted into his own being by the initiate, it was priests of Hermes or Mercury who accompanied the aspirant upon his entry into his etheric body. The first experience that appeared there was that one entered into time—the etheric body is the 39